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Shadow Company by Nick Bicanic and Jason Bourque

Shadow Company
by Nick Bicanic and Jason Bourque (Canada, 2007, 85 minutes)

Nick Bicanic and Jason Bourque’s Shadow Company examines the profession of the “private security contractor,” the most recent euphemism for the age-old profession of the mercenary. Nick Bicanic trained with Blackwater in order to make this film which follows some of the private security contractors in Iraq, where the use of private military companies (PMCs) is far more extensive than in any other war in modern history. The film also explores other sites of contemporary conflict where mercenaries play a significant role and examines the history of the profession through interviews with war journalists, historians, ethicists, soldiers and mercenaries themselves.

“With over

$100 billion in annual revenues and 70,000 employees in Iaq alone, the private military industry is booming, yet few cvilians know anything about it. It’s time we all started asking the question: What are we really risking by allowing profit-motivated corporations into the business of war?” – Film directors Bicanic and Bourque

“Fascinating, evenhanded documentary about the big business of guns for hire. Flourishes of style – comic-book illustrations, video-game scenes and news footage swirled together in an Oliver Stone-esque mélange — give a flavor of the personalities involved while academics and security experts fill in the historical and political context.” – LA Weekly

Kino21 regrets that due to unavoidable circumstances concerning international screening rights, we are not able to screen Romuald Karmakar’s Warheads for its final HOW WE FIGHT: Mercenaries program.  Instead, we are substituting a free screening of the also excellent and excellently titled Canadian film Shadow Company, a work which takes us back where we started the series:  Iraq today.

Artists’ Television Access  is proud to present a program of works by video artist Wago Kreider. Working from soundtracks borrowed from classic Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s, layered with lush images that re-create their original locations, Wago Kreider creates a dream-filled landscape of cinematic memory. The ghosts of Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, and Joan Crawford are conjured, their uncanny voices linking dead celluloid to a living and breathing present. The classic films Niagara, Vertigo, and Johnny Guitar are re-enacted in his videos Capturing Rose, Between 2 Deaths, and Vienna in the Desert. Director in person.

Wago Kreider is a media artist whose work investigates the legacy of classical Hollywood film history, and its relation to issues of place, landscape, and authorship. Stylistically, many of his videos explore the perceptual changes and conceptual impact of the micro-edit, in which staccato montage rhythms manipulate appropriated imagery like phrases in a musical composition. He is co-curator, along with Jessica Allee, of the San Francisco based avant-garde film and video screening series Studio 27. Currently, he is Assistant Professor of Video in the Media Arts program at Southern Illinois University.

Hedy Honigmann

kino21’s fall series, How We Fight, presents international works that explore soldiering and depict the experience of war from the point of view of those on the ground. From Argentina, Russia, Iraq, Germany, France, Holland and the U.S., several of these films are US premieres. On Thursday, September 25 we begin with Iraqi Short Films, a brand new compilation of videos shot in battle by soldiers and militia members in Iraq. Subsequent programs include video diaries of the battlefield and pre- or post-combat rumination, extended observational portraits and interview-based works. There are depictions of Russian conscripts in Chechnya, PKK rebels in the mountains of Iraq, American veterans returned from Vietnam, and mercenaries and peacekeepers stationed across the globe, from Bosnia to Rwanda, from the Middle East to the USA.

As the fourth program of our series we shift to the peacekeeping soldier, screening Dutch filmmaker Hedy Honigmann’s Crazy. Known for her documentaries on Paris street musicians (Underground Orchestra), Peruvian taxi drivers (Metal and Melancholy) and Brazilian fans of the erotic poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade (O Amor Natural), Honigmann is a master of the interview. Here she turns her attention to soldiers who are “peacekeepers,” Dutch veterans of UN peacekeeping and humanitarian forces who were stationed in Korea, Lebanon, Vietnam, Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia.

Structured primarily around conversations with nine former soldiers, Honigmann’s film incorporates home videos, photo scrapbooks, news footage, letters, and journals. It is not easy to speak about the experience of war; about the trauma of witnessing brutality, massacres, and starvation; about the after-effects of PTSD, depression, or attempted suicide. In spite of this difficulty, it is Honigmann’s solicitation of the soldiers’ words and feelings that give the film its force. In particular, her request that they share the piece of music most vividly encapsulating their wartime experiences leads them to let down their verbal guard. As they, and in turn we, listen to this music – which ranges from Seal’s “Crazy” to Puccini’s “Turandot” and Guns ‘n’ Roses’ “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” — something is let loose. What words fail to express or what the soldiers’ denial of their vulnerability suppresses, the force of the music eloquently conveys through sound and body language as they listen. A powerful testament to what it means to endure or witness the excruciating suffering of warfare, Honigmann’s film about the futility of the peacekeepers is one of war’s most compelling indictments.

How We Fight: Conscripts, Mercenaries, Terrorists and Peacekeepers is presented with the generous support of the Potrero Nuevo Fund of the Tides Foundation, the LEF Foundation, and Goethe Institut San Francisco.